Tag: Movie

This month’s What’s the Difference? from Cinefix covers the amazing Spike Lee film based on the autobiography of the same name: BlacKkKlansman.

I have been reading quite a bit about fascism and racism lately. As someone who got lucky to be living in privileged skin, these are issues I feel we all need to be more aware of and actively standing against.

Instead of my normal comment on the film or book, I suggest watching the Vice coverage of the Charlottesville rally, Philosophy Tube’s videos on racism, Antifa and fascism, and reading the book on how to oppose fascism.

This month’s What’s the Difference? from CineFix covers Ready Player One.

Normally I’d add a few comments here about what I thought about the book and/or the movie, particularly the adaptation. But Ready Player One falls into an odd realm for me. I’d initially had the book on my TBR pile but ended up removing it after a discussion at a writers’ group. The gist was that the book is a great example of the “you’re not a real geek” toxicity that pervades geek culture, exemplified by rating pop culture references.

Then when the movie trailers came out, it too looked like one long list of pop culture references that only true geeks would appreciate… By appreciate, I mean argue and post overanalysed articles and Youtube videos online for weeks after most people have moved on.

Hey look, here’s a video of all the pop culture references:

This is a roundabout way of saying I haven’t read the book nor watched the movie, nor do I feel particularly inspired to do either. Enjoy the video anyway.

Update – This covers Ready Player One from a writer’s perspective:

Further Update – This video expands on my point above about toxic geek culture with reference to GamerGate.

Do you prefer a Chianti or an Amarone to accompany human liver and fava beans? This month CineFix ask the question in their What’s the Difference? on Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris.

I’m going to be controversial here and say that the movie, Silence of the Lambs, was better than the book. That’s right. I’ll give you some time to warm up the tar and pluck the chickens.

That isn’t to say that the novel is bad, far from it. In my original reviews of Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs, I noted that they were great stories, very interesting and layered (thematically, compositionally, etc), and gave us a charismatic villain for the history books. But I wasn’t a fan of the writing. Some passages were on point, especially some of the dialogue that was pretty much lifted straight into the movie, but other parts felt like they were letting down the team.

Compare that with the cinematic classic and you can see which one stands taller. The themes, particularly the sexism, are more subtle yet more omnipresent (camera angles and shot staging vs inner monologue). The tone of the film is brought to life, and how could it not be with Anthony Hopkins’ Lecter exuding menace and demonic magnetism, and the brilliant cinematography – the night vision scene is unmatched.

It’s a pity none of the movie sequels managed to capture the same magic. I’m yet to read the rest of the Hannibal Lecter novels, so it would be interesting to hear if they managed to continue the magic, or if they slowly drained of life with each thin slice.

I’m late to the Mark Watney appreciation society, since I only heard about this book as a result of the movie trailer. I guess at least I didn’t find out about the book after watching the movie and wondering if it was based on anything. The blurb essentially sums up the novel “Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first men to walk on the surface of Mars. Now, he’s sure he’ll be the first man to die there.” There you go, premise done.

To say I enjoyed this book is an understatement, as I usually hate novels that try to be hard sci-fi. I mean, if I want to read a physics text book I’ll grab the one on my shelf, not some of the “plausible” made up stuff that hurts my needless exposition aversion gland. So to find a hard sci-fi story that manages to be so entertaining was no small feat. The humour was a big part of the reason for the enjoyment. I felt that this addition was very important to not only the characterisation of Watney the space-nerd – because nerds are normally only funny to laugh at – but also in how too many novels would have taken the same premise far too seriously.

So now I’m looking forward to the movie. This should adapt very well to the big screen, and Matt Damon seems like a great choice for Watney. Hopefully Ridley Scott won’t go all Prometheus with The Martian and we’ll have a great adaptation.

The latest instalment of Cinefix’s What’s the Difference is out. This time they tackle the ridiculously named X-Men: Days of Future Past.

So this is one book in the book vs movie series that I haven’t read. Although, in my defence, the Marvel Comic Universe is such an overlapping, rebooted, reshaped, alternate-time-lined, mish-mash of ridiculous proportions that it probably wouldn’t matter if I had. Watching the breakdown it becomes obvious that the screenwriters did a good job of streamlining the plot and picking characters who would work for the movie adaptation. Less clear is why the movie got so lazy with the “and then he woke up” ending.

Is there anyone Deadpool hasn’t killed? Not after Deadpool Kills Deadpool.

In the previous instalments of Deadpool Kills our titular merc with a mouth killed everyone in the Marvel Universe and then moved on to killing everyone in the Ideaverse (Killustrated). Odd that he didn’t kill the DC Universe whilst he was at it. Regardless, this time Deadpool is killing himself across the multiverse. And yes, that is just as awesome as it sounds.

Most recently I read Killustrated, also written by Cullen Bunn, which was a fantastic story but felt abridged or not fully realised. This instalment felt the most fully realised in the series. The irreverent humour, quips and quirkiness are on fully display, right next to the full tilt action. But the fun stuff is also backed up with the story being fully realised this time, instead of being glossed over as it was in the other Deadpool Kills. As if to illustrate just how quickly the previous plots were glossed over, we actually have the synopsis delivered multiple times without upsetting the pacing here (although it might feel a tad trite to some readers).

Next stop will have to be Deadpool Classic.

Also it is worth noting that in my review for Killustrated I mentioned the leaked test footage for a potential Deadpool movie. Well, that movie is now being made!! I guess someone saw how well Guardians of the Galaxy did at the box office and decided humorous comic book movies could be made after all.

You know, the people who only read the book after they’ve made a movie of it. I’m not quite as bad as the people who only read the book after they have seen the movie: those people are just pure evil.

I’ve had Guardians of The Galaxy Volumes 1 and 2 sitting on my TBR list since I heard something about a movie with a talking racoon in it. Any movie that has a talking animal in it falls into only a few categories: kids film, lame comedy film, or worst movie ever. What piqued my interest was the movie hadn’t trodden down the Jar-Jar Binks route and had instead turned in solid gold awesome. To the bookshelf!

Guardians is a very entertaining read. It is action packed, has plenty of humour and has a cast of interesting characters who are meant to be a team, but are always in a state of social flux. They are also fighting against many foes as they try to keep the universe from falling apart or being invaded from other dimensions. They even find time to make jokes about how lame it would be to have an altered timeline plot as they kick off an altered timeline plot.

The thing that held Guardians back from being a four star read for me was the intercut frames. During most action sequences the writers/artists interspersed post-action debriefing scenes. Whilst this did give the humour a place to really dig in, it did also detract from the tension of the action scenes to an extent. Several times I noticed myself rapt with the life-or-death struggle only to have one of the characters talk about it post tense: “That was pretty close.” Now this isn’t that big a deal, since heroes don’t die. Ever. Not permanently at least. So it could be argued that they’ve instead decided to parody or make some jokes about, or around, action scenes. Thus, even my opinion could be swayed up if I were to read this on a different day.

Goodreads Reviews

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